CarltonBale.com

I was sitting at work wishing I could go somewhere for lunch and watch the inauguration. Then I went to CNN.com to see if I could catch a live stream. I was surprised that a Facebook application popped up beside the video and I was able to view my friend's comments in real time. [...]

I think Microsoft should be given credit for single-handedly stimulating the economy. Consumer spending is down, most of the Black Friday deals are lame, but I'm purchasing things that have been on my Wish List for years.  Why?  Because I can get 25% cash back if I purchase an Ebay Buy It Now item and [...]

About a year ago, I somehow happened upon a request from computer case manufacturer CoolerMaster to browse their new website and provide feedback on areas where improvements were needed.  In short, the site was terrible, with coding errors, navigation issues, and worthless search capabilities. I provided feedback thinking that they would actually value it and [...]

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is a great way to store (and optionally share) large amounts of data. It’s cheap, fast, and reliable. If you’re a casual user, you may not know that you do much more than just store and sever data of HTTP, as long as you use an advanced application such as [...]

I've tried several different Amazon S3 file managers and had settled on the free S3 Firefox Organizer. But then I tried Bucket Explorer. Not only did it do everything I needed it to do, it introduced to me new features I didn't know Amazon S3 supported. If you're like me, you love free and [...]

I happened upon the site WebSiteOptimization.com and started testing the performance of my site. I was astounded by how long it would take to load the front page of my site over a 14.4 kbps modem connection. True, not many people use a modem connection anymore, but still, 130 seconds is a long time to [...]

A few months ago, I noticed I was approaching my bandwidth limits on my hosting account. Switching hosting providers is a pain, so I decided to move some high-bandwidth graphics to Amazon S3, where the bandwidth is cheap and unlimited. All was well until I realized that Google was returning search results pointing to my [...]

I recently needed to share some open source files via BitTorrent and wanted to host them on my Amazon S3 account.  For those of you familiar with S3, here is the short-answer: add ?torrent to the end of the URL of a public-shared file to get the *.torrent file, so the link would be http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name?torrent
If [...]

I noticed a weird charge on my credit card from "Mnesvc Inc Seattle" on 9/1. I initially thought it was a fradulent charge, but it was for less than $2, so I was a little confused. After a little more research, I found that Mnesvc [...]

If you're like me, you probably registered a few extra domain names over the years and never got a chance to do anything with them. They just sit there and you keep paying annual renewal fees. While renewing one such domain name, I noticed that GoDaddy.com now offers a service that they call Cash Parking.  [...]